Strathmore High keeps up with 3D technology

Times Reporter       

 

Technology is quickly evolving all around us, and it is up to the teachers in our schools to make sure our kids are keeping up with the changes. Strathmore High School (SHS) is trying to keep up with some of the advances in technology. At the end of the 2013 school year they purchased two Solidoodle 3 3D printing machines.  

Ed Eberts’ Design Studies class has been assigned one, and Art teacher Brandy Roberts also has one available to use, though both are currently in Eberts’ class. Over the years Eberts has become more of a multimedia teacher, taking on the design class last year. 

“The reason why I really wanted one is I thought teaching this class with Design Studies about designing things, wouldn’t it be cool if they could then print it?” said Eberts. 

Only four students who were in Grade 10 design class last year have followed through into the Grade 11 class. This year they are getting the opportunity to actually work with the printers and create different designs. 

Matt Sandum, Logan Blakney, Jared Dougan and Braden Burton are the first students at SHS to take the new course. 

“The first year of using Inventor we didn’t have the 3D printers, it was cool just designing stuff, but now that you can design it and then make it, it’s a lot cooler,” said Blakney. 

“It’s interesting, you can do it yourself and not rely on somebody else making it for you.” 

The four boys are excited at the potential the 3D printing has in all aspects of life. They would all like to make working gears on the printer, and are currently working on making brackets so they can build their own Plexiglas box around the printer to help keep heat in. 

“A lot of this stuff you can just download it off the Internet and then print it out. So there might be something you like, and if you find someone else who made it, you can print it,” said Eberts. 

“The future is kind of cool, you might not have to buy a product, and you might just buy a file and print it yourself.”

Eberts explained that a 3D printer is sort of like a combination between a glue gun and a printer except your ‘glue’ is plastic. The nozzle goes back and forth like a printer, sprays down a layer of plastic and then the table drops down and it goes again across what it has done, which is why there are some grooves in the finished product. 

You can make your own design, and when you are done you save it as a file, which can be sent to the printer. Then the computer program does the slicing, learns how many layers and the path it has to follow to spit out the plastic, and then the printer makes it into an actual object. 

The program SHS uses is Autodesk, and the students are learning on Inventor, which is a digital prototyping program. 

There have been a few failures as they learn how to use that machine, and there have been some interesting tips learned through watching YouTube videos, like spraying hairspray on the glass to help the plastic stick. 

The first thing they printed was a little blue bunny head. 

“What we want to do is we want to start making our own iPhone cases with our school’s logo and then give them away,” said Eberts. 

Art teacher Brandy Roberts is excited about the potential the printer has with her art class. She would love to use it for casting one day but plans to mostly use it for jewelry for now. 

“As soon as I saw the first 3D printed thing I thought that’s just another material we could work with. I think the fact that it can be 100 per cent original, it can be a component to something that they have already created in another medium, there’s no end to what they (can create), ” said Roberts. 

“I think almost every department can use it in some way if you have the time and the accessibility to it.” 

The technology is changing fast, said Roberts. Now 3D scanners are being made, where you can put on object on the scanner, it scans and then will print that object on the 3D printer. Windows is even offering built-in 3D printing drivers in its computers now.  

“It’s funny because it is not really that new anymore, it’s just now becoming a more public, and more accessible, before you had to be a little bit more nerdy to know how to use that stuff, now it’s accessible to everyone,” said Roberts. 

“There are a lot of schools now considering buying one.”

It’s not too farfetched to think that one day everyone will have a 3D printer in their home. There are a number of different 3D printing applications, and the possibilities seem endless. 

“I hope that some of them think of it as a career or think about using it on the farm or wherever. You could print out a tool that you need or if something breaks on the machine you don’t have to run in to order one,” said Eberts about his hopes for his design class. 

“I would like to see us offering the Autodesk certification so somebody in high school could get the certificate and be certified by Autodesk for their program.”